Nice Start is not your typical self-help book. It’s not about mystical forces and secrets, it’s not pious, it’s not self-important, it’s not terribly terribly serious. It is both more modest and more audacious, both more humble and more intelligent.

In a mind-numbing world, Nice Start is mind-nourishing. It is full of questions you may never have asked yourself. Gentle questions, serious questions, amusing questions, thought-provoking questions. Intelligent questions you can use to create the life you want.

You are the only person smart enough to answer those questions. Your answers are the only ones that matter.

Answering those questions can change your life.

The questions in Nice Start are all about you: what you think, what you believe, and what you want. And what subject could be more interesting or more important than you?

Nice Start is about you, your life, and your dreams. You have everything to gain.

From the Introduction to Nice Start

You know that you have to buy a ticket if you want to win the lottery. You know that there’s not some vast secret of life that can only be told now. You know that if the universe maintains an advice department, it’s more likely to encourage you to take action than to recommend you sit at home and hope really hard. You know that few of the people you admire attribute their joy and success to inertia. You find it hard to imagine Captain Picard solving a galactic emergency on the starship Enterprise by commanding his crew, “Wish it so!”

You don’t need someone to tell you you can do it and to fill you with heroic imagery of gold medals, triumphant parades, and soaring eagles. You already know, grasshopper. You’ve learned by experience that it works to work at something and that there’s not enough time to work at everything.

You have learned much. You realize the difference between positive and negative thinking. You know the value of honesty, especially with yourself. You respect responsibility, in others and in yourself, and its power to inspire progress. You understand the strength of integrity.

What comes next, what you do with what you’ve learned, is up to you. That’s what Nice Start is about and what Nice Start is for.

I don’t know if Nice Start will make you happy. Of course, no book can reach into your skull and tickle your brain chemistry to cause happiness. I don’t even know if you came to Nice Start for happiness. Maybe you came for stimulation, confirmation, clarification, education, relaxation, validation, or something else. Think about it.

“Think about it” is what Nice Start is about. It’s about being conscious of how you think and what you think. Why is that important? Well, as they say, if you want to change your life, change your mind. Nice Start is about helping you consciously change your mind to get more of what you want in your life.

Nice Start is not for people who want to coast through life. It’s not for people who wait for things to happen. It’s not for people who want to be told what to do. It’s not for people who have enough. Nice Start is for people who drive, who make things happen, who run their own lives, who want more. (More what? We’ll get to that in the book.) It’s about deliberately, actively producing what’s next in your life. It’s about being conscious.

Nice Start is not about silver bullets, magic pills, psychobabble, too-good-to-be-true anecdotes, or be-like-me advice. It is about good questions, because good questions stimulate good answers.

Nice Start is not about my answers to those questions. I’m not wise enough, brash enough, or young enough to have your answers. It is about good questions and your good answers. It’s your life, and it’s your book now.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), Alice in Wonderland